Spectreview: Grimes – Miss Anthropocene

Grimes’ fifth record is a conceptually ambitious art-pop extravaganza that’s alternately freewheeling and frustratingly untethered.

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“You’ll miss me when I’m down”

[If you stop and think about it, Claire Boucher (of Grimes, or “‘c’ AKA the artist formerly known as Grimes” if it counts) has spent the years following her ascendance to boundary-pushing popular artist courting a certain provocativeness. We’re not talking provocative in the same way as someone like Cardi B, whose charisma and refreshing brashness – along with some regrettable forays into casual crime – has earned her as many rabid detractors as rabid fans. Grimes is provocative in a more cerebral fashion; she might be today’s quintessential “pop artist” in how she’s more willing than many in her class to draw the actual line between art and pop. As a visual artist, fashion designer, musician and producer (hell, even as a personality), Boucher consistently focuses on a cross between commercially-focused superficiality and intellectual substance, an incredibly tenuous thing to balance that only a few acts in history have ever truly achieved.

The problem is that even a slight breeze can tip those scales, and there’s plenty on Boucher’s plate that keep her firmly in the realm of superficiality to many, in terms fair (her flippant explanations of her high concepts, her obsessions with blatant commercial music, her unapologetic following of wherever her muse takes her) and unfair (her status as a woman in an incessantly patriarchal culture and her highly visible relationship to tech-god Elon Musk). That last point alone gives her another spiritual connection to someone like Yoko Ono, in that she’s got a whole separate audience now that won’t ever understand where she’s coming from artistically. No wonder she feels like coming back to the shadows.

If Art Angels established Boucher as a purveyor of pop music, Miss Anthropocene strives to bring a greater sense of conceptuality back into the fold, personifying climate change as a goddess and casting the planet as a victim in an abusive relationship. As such, it’s somewhat of a return to the darker work that defined early Grimes albums, albeit with a now-signature mixture of high fidelity and reverb-heavy smear. The overarching concept works fine, even if it’s not faithfully carried all the way through, but loose concepts have been a thing since Sgt. Pepper. What’s arguably more important is that Boucher is all over the place on this record, at times committing to the blueprint and at others throwing it away completely for somewhat-related commentaries about opiate addiction (the oddly catchy “Wonderwall” mashup of “Delete Forever”), social media haranguing (the smudgy “My Name is Dark”) and the influence of depression on the creative process (the hooky, poignant “you’re going to miss me when I’m around”). Still, there are other times where she discards commentary altogether and just commits to the banger, and these moments, including the kalimba-led drum-and-bass breaks of “4ÆM,” are arguably some of the record’s best.

It might be a clusterfuck, but that’s how she’s always operated, and consequently your interpretation of this record will vary on how much you want to put yourself on her wavelength. At its best, it’s an endlessly fascinating, freewheeling playground where legendary pop voices of the past are reformatted into places where they once never dared to go: a galactic battleground atop a dead planet (the trance-inclined opener “So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth”), the feathery slow-burn epic of “IDORU,” even the metallic chug of industrial nü-metal (“We Appreciate Power”). At its quixotic worst, it’s a bit of a dour slog that smacks of too much effort and too many explored avenues, where a refocusing on one particular angle may have yielded more effective results.

What of these “results” though? Personifying the climate crisis may make for heady discussion, but will it matter when the world collapses under the weight of human existence in a disconcertingly small number of years? Loose concepts may be a triviality in art, but what we face in the near future, the subject that Boucher intends to intellectualize here, is something that demands more than what she brings to the table. Perhaps that’s why the messiness she presents here is so potentially infuriating, yet it begs to be said: what else could she have done? And what does it matter? Can anyone provide the answers to this mess, a salvation from our existential anxieties? And there lies the inevitable conclusion: art can provide a distraction, but it can’t possibly save us from what’s coming; To that extent, it might be enough to make a record that, in its indecipherable vocals and wildly scatterbrained focus, embodies the paradoxes of humanity that doomed us in the first place.

Recommended for homework.